All commands (14,187)

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands


Check These Out

Zip each file in a directory individually with the original file name
This will list the files in a directory, then zip each one with the original filename individually. video1.wmv -> video1.zip video2.wmv -> video2.zip This was for zipping up large amounts of video files for upload on a Windows machine.

Create a square thumbnail or favicon using ImageMagick
Resize `file.png` to a 32x32 px image. Use a value other than 32 to create other icon sizes (e.g. 16x16 or 32x32). Combine two favicon sizes using: `convert icon-16px.png icon-32px.png favicon.ico` For a social media preview image, use `2:1#` for the extent and `1200` for the scale.

give me back my sound card
for when a program is hogging the sound output. finds, and kills. add -9 to the end for wedged processes. add in 'grep ^program' after lsof to filter.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

List the size (in human readable form) of all sub folders from the current location
Tested on MacOS and GNU/Linux. It works in dirs containing files starting with '-'. It runs 'du' only once. It sorts according to size. It treats 1K=1000 (and not 1024)

Generate SHA1 hash for each file in a list
All output is placed in file SHA1SUMS which you can later check with 'sha1sum --check'. Works on most Linux distros where 'sha1sum' is installed.

Get the version of sshd on a remote system
I used this to confirm an upgrade to an SSH daemon was successful

Truncate long strings in columns and use custom header names
Using the --table-truncate ( -T ) option, you can specify the columns you will allow to be truncated. This helps when you have some columns that are unusually long, or a small terminal window. In this example we will print out the /etc/passwd file in columns. We are using a colon as our separator ( -s: ), defining that we want table output ( -t ), defining the column names ( -N ) and allowing the column NAME to be truncated ( -T ).

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Print info about your real user.
To get your effective user: whoami


Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: